Introduction to Moodle 2 Getting Started - Wofford Collegewebs.wofford.edu/whisnantdm/Training/Moodle/Moodle2... · Moodle 2 – Getting Started Page 6 28-Aug-13 Wofford College Editing

Moodle 2 – Getting Started Page 1

28-Aug-13 Wofford College

Introduction to Moodle 2 Getting Started

Table of Contents

Browsers ......................................................................................................................................... 2

Gaining Access to Moodle 2 ........................................................................................................... 2

The Course Homepage .................................................................................................................... 2

Docking Blocks ............................................................................................................................... 3

Setting Up Your Course .................................................................................................................. 4

Editing the Course Homepage ........................................................................................................ 6

Adding General Information ........................................................................................................... 6

Adding a Document by Drag & Drop ............................................................................................. 7

Adding a Document as a File .......................................................................................................... 7

Linking to a Web Site ..................................................................................................................... 9

Adding an Image ........................................................................................................................... 11

Setting Up a Week or a Topic ....................................................................................................... 13

Changing a Section Heading ......................................................................................................... 14

Adding another Web Page ............................................................................................................ 15

Storing Files in a Folder ................................................................................................................ 17

Seeing What the Students See....................................................................................................... 18

Making Changes ........................................................................................................................... 19

Adding an Assignment .................................................................................................................. 19

Adding a Discussion Forum.......................................................................................................... 21

Deleting Stuff ................................................................................................................................ 23

Displaying Each Section on a Different Page ............................................................................... 23

Making a Course Available to Students ........................................................................................ 25

Using the Moodle Gradebook ....................................................................................................... 25

Using Moodle to Record Attendance ............................................................................................ 35

Appendix: Grading Aggregation ................................................................................................... 38



Browsers

Moodle 2’s features work best with the Chrome, Firefox, Internet Explorer 10 or Safari 6

browsers. Some of its features, such as drag & drop, do not work in Internet Explorer 9 or Safari

5.

Gaining Access to Moodle 2

In myWofford, click on the Moodle 2 link in the System Links

section.

You will see an overview of your courses. There may be several

listed. The current courses will be at the bottom of the list, shaded

in gray.

Click on the course for which you want to create a home page.

The Course Homepage

At the beginning, your course

Homepage will look something like

this.

The Homepage has three columns.

The left and right columns contain

blocks that display menus and

other useful information.

The center section is where you

will put information about your

course.



Docking Blocks

The blocks in the left and right columns take up a lot of space

on the screen. If you like, you can dock the blocks so they

appear as tabs on the left of the Moodle window.

To dock a block, click to the right of the blue line in the icon in

the upper right corner of the block.

Docked blocks appear as tabs on the left side of the Moodle

window. The contents of the block become visible if you point the

mouse at its tab.

If the appearance of your course page is dependent

on the blocks being docked, you will need to tell

your students about it. Each user must dock blocks

on his or her own Moodle page



Setting Up Your Course

The first thing you need to do is set up your course. Click on Edit Settings

in the Settings block menu.

This will bring you to an “Edit

Course Settings” page.

Most of the course already will be set

up. Here are some things you might

want to change.

One of your choices will be to arrange your Moodle course

Homepage with a weekly or topics format. The default setting is

topics.

You also can specify how many topics or weeks you wish to

display.

You can specify the course layout: whether you

want all sections of the course to be displayed on

one page or each section to be displayed on a

separate page. We will go into this option later in

these instructions.



We will use the “Weekly” format in these instructions.

If you plan on using the gradebook, you may want to

leave “Show gradebook to students” set to Yes.

I usually set this to No until I have the course page and

gradebook set up.

By default, the course page will not be available to students in your class. I recommend leaving

it unavailable until you have the course page set up.

Click on Save Changes at the bottom of the page when you are finished



Editing the Course Homepage

Now we can start to edit the Homepage. Click on the Turn

editing on button in the upper right of the Moodle window.

Adding General Information

Now, let’s move to the center column that contains

specific information about your course. First we

will put in the course’s title and brief description.

With editing on, click on the text edit icon in the

General section at the top of of the Moodle

window.

In the text editing workspace, enter the

name of the course. Designate it as the

largest heading, Heading 1, and

Center the text.

You also can add some descriptive text

below the tile, if you should so desire.

Click on Save changes when you are

finished.



You will see the text at the

top of the Moodle page.

Adding a Document by Drag & Drop

NOTE: This does not work for

Internet Explorer 9 or Safari 5

You probably will want to post a Word

or PDF document, such as a syllabus or

course schedule, on the Course

Homepage.

With most browsers, you can easily add

the file for the document by drag and

drop.

Adding a Document as a File

If you cannot use drag & drop to

add a document, click on Add an

activity or resource



You will see a window with a list of activities and

resources. Select File under Resources.

Then click on Add.

In the “Adding a new File” window,

enter the Name of the file and a

Description of the file.

The click on Add under Content.

In the File picker that appears, click on

Upload a file.



Then Choose the file using its location on your own computer.

When the file has been chosen, Upload it.

When this process is complete, you should see an icon for the

file in the “Select files” area.

When you are through, click on Save and return to the course at the bottom of the “Adding a

new File” window.

Links to the documents now will be on the

Homepage.

You can post any kind of file: Word,

Excel, PDF, PowerPoint, audio, video, etc.

Linking to a Web Site

You also can add a link to an external web site. Let’s add a link to the Honor Code on the

Wofford web site:

http://www.wofford.edu/uploadedFiles/studentLife/0708HonorCode.pdf

Click on Add an activity or resource and select URL from the

Resources list.



Do the following in the

“Adding a new URL”

window that appears.

1. Enter the Name of the

hyperlink

2. Enter a Description of the

hyperlink

3. Paste in or enter the URL

for the hyperlink

4. Change Display to Open.

5. Click on Save and return

to course at the bottom of

the page.



Adding an Image

You may want to add your picture

and contact information in the

heading of your page.

After you are finished, the

General section at the top of the

course page will look like this

when the editing has been turned

off.

Click on the Text Edit icon for the General section of the course page,

which will be located directly above the document and URL links you have

added.

In the set of Edit icons, click on the Toggle full screen icon to show a larger editing window.

Add the text shown below and space all the text down one row to separate it from the title.

Locate the cursor in

the position

indicated in this

picture.



Click on the Insert Image icon in the set of text editor icons.

In the “Insert/Edit Image” window that appears, click

on Find or upload an image.

Do the following in the “File Picker”

window.

1. Click on Upload a file

2. Click on Choose File

3. Find the file on your computer.

When you have selected it you

should see its name beside the

“Choose File” button

4. Click on Upload this file.

You should see the picture in the “Preview”

section at this point.

Enter a name in the Image description text box.

Click on the Appearance tab.



Under the “Appearance” tab specify the following:

Set the Alignment to Right

Set the Horizontal Space to 10. This creates some

space around the picture so that the text won’t run

right up to its borders.

Set the Border to 1.

Note that you can change the dimensions of the image if you

so desire.

Click on Insert when you are ready.

Toggle the full-screen icon again so

you are back to the smaller editing

window.

The picture may not be visible in this

view. In this case, you will see the

name you gave it.

Click on Save Changes.

Setting Up a Week or a Topic

Let’s set up one of the weeks (or topics, if that is what you are using) to give students

information about course activities for that week. We will do the following:

1. Change the section heading

2. Add some descriptive text for the week’s activities

3. Create another page describing the students’ assignments for the week.

4. Store three PDF documents in a folder on the Moodle page.



Changing a Section Heading

We will do this by editing the summary for the week (or topic).

Click on the Edit summary icon under the week or topic

heading.

Do the following:

1. Uncheck the “Use default section name” box

2. Enter a new Section Name (In this example, “Aug 28 – Sep 3: Big Data”)

3. Inside the text editing box, press the Enter key to space down one row.

4. Enter some descriptive text for the topic.

5. Click on Save Changes



Adding another Page

You are not limited to putting all the course information on the main course page. We can add

other pages linked from the main course page. Let’s add another page describing the students’

assignments for the week.

Click on Add an activity or resource in this section of the course page.

Select Page under “Resources” and click on Add.

Enter a name and a brief

description of the page.

In the Page Content

section, enter what you

want the students to see

when they go to this page.

When you are ready, click

on Save and return to

course.



You will see a link to the new page on the main course page.

If you click on the link, you will see the new web page with the content that you entered.

You can return to the main course

page by clicking on either the

browser’s back arrow or the name

of the course in the navigation

string (WEC1 in this example).



Storing Files in a Folder

If you are furnishing links to several documents on a Moodle page,

long lists of links can get out of hand and create a very long page

requiring a lot of scrolling to navigate.

If these documents are related to each other in some way – for instance

part of the same assignment – you can store them all in a folder on the

Moodle page to cut down the clutter.

Suppose that you want the students to read three PDF files as part of their

assignment. Let’s set up a folder to hold the files.

Click on Add an activity or resource and add a Folder.

Do the following on the

“Adding a new Folder . . “

page.

1. Give the folder a name

2. Add a description of

the folder.

3. Suppose that you

would like to display

this description on the

course page to explain

what is in the folder.

In this case, check

Display description

on course.”

4. Drag and drop the files

into the folder.

5. Click on Save and

return to course.



On the main course page, you will

see a link to the folder.

Because we have chosen to display

the description of the folder, you

also will see the description below

the name of the folder.

If you click on the folder link, you will see a

window with links to the contents of the folder.

Seeing What the Students See

At this point, it might be useful to check what the students are going to

see when they use the course Homepage.

In the Settings block, click on Switch role to and then Student.

This will display the course page as a generic student will see it.

When you are through being a student, click on Return to my normal

role at the top of the page.



Making Changes

If you want to edit the content of an activity or

resource, click on the Update icon in the string of

icons to the left of the link.

If you want to edit only the title of an activity or

resource, click on the Edit Title icon in the string

of icons to the left of the link

Adding an Assignment

Suppose that you want to assign a writing assignment. You want the students to submit the

completed assignment as a Word document.

You also want to be able to do two things after the assignment has been graded.

Comment on the student’s work

Return an electronic copy of the document that you marked up in Word, maybe with red

text, when you were reviewing it in the process of grading it.

Click on Add an activity or resource and add an Assignment.

The page for setting up an assignment is a long one, with many choices to be made. The

following page outlines a few of these choice.



1. Give the assignment a Name

2. Add instructions to the

students about what they

need to do for the assignment

3. Specify when the assignment

is available and the deadline

for submissions. If you don’t

want to do this, uncheck the

Enable boxes.

4. Tell Moodle NOT to notify

you when assignments are

submitted (unless you want a

lot of email messages).

5. If students are to submit

assignments as a file, such as

a Word document, set File

Submissions to Yes. If you

choose Online text, they can

answer the assignment on

Moodle.

6. If you want to give students

feedback, set Feedback

Comments to Yes.

7. If you want to return

annotated copies of the Word

document to students, set

Feedback files to Yes.

8. Enter the Maximum Grade

for the assignment. (I chose

50 in this example.)

9. If you have set up your

gradebook, enter the

Gradebook Category under

which the assignments should

be placed.

10. Click on Save and return to course.



Adding a Discussion Forum

You may want to post topics designed to encourage an online discussion among the students in

your class. Let’s post some discussion topics.

There are two steps to creating a discussion forum in Moodle:

1. Creating the forum

2. Adding topics to be discussed in this forum

A. Creating a Forum

First the forum.

Click on Add an activity or resource and add a Forum.

Enter the name and a brief

introduction to the forum.

Save and return to course when

you are finished.

This only sets up a framework for the forum. We now must add a topic to discuss.



B. Adding a Discussion Topic

To add discussion topics to the forum we just

created, click on the link to the forum on the

course page.

Click on Add a new discussion topic.

Enter the Subject of

the discussion and the

Question you want to

ask to stimulate the

discussion.

I recommend selecting

I don’t want email

copies of posts to the

forum unless you are

fond of email

messages.

Click on Post to

forum.

You should see the discussion topic posted on the

forum. If you click on the link to the topic, you

will see the question.



Deleting Stuff

If you have decided not to use a particular resource or activity, you can remove it from the

course page.

When editing is on, you will see a line of icons to the right of each

resource and activity. One of the icons is an X, which stands for

delete. If you click on this icon, the resource or activity will be

deleted.

Displaying Each Section on a Different Page

If you are furnishing a lot of

information on Moodle, your

course page quickly can

become very long, which

requires a lot of scrolling to

reach the bottom.

The page shown at the right is a

good example of the “screen

overload” that occurs when you

furnish a lot of information on

Moodle.

This can be fixed in Moodle 2

by displaying each section of

the course on a separate web

page.



In the Settings block, choose Edit Settings

In the “Edit Settings” page, select the Course Layout to be Show one

section per page.

Save changes.

When you display one section

per page, the main course page

will display only the section

headings.

Each section heading is a link to

another page that contains the

information for that section.



Making a Course Available to Students

When you begin, a course by default is not available to students so they cannot see the Moodle

page as you develop it. When you are ready, you can make the course available so that students

have access to it.

To make a course available, select the Settings block

and then Edit Settings. Change “Availability” to

This course is available to students.

Using the Moodle Gradebook

Using the Moodle gradebook is optional, but is a good application of Moodle if you give many

grades in a course. Once you have the gradebook set up, Moodle will do all the averaging. All

you need to do is enter the grades. The gradebook also is an excellent way to keep students

informed about their progress in the course.

A. An Example Course

Let’s assume that grades will be given for the following activities in your course

Assignment #1 50 pts Discussion #1 25 pts Exam #1 100 pts

Assignment #2 50 pts Discussion #2 25 pts Exam #2 200 pts

Assignment #3 50 pts

B. Categories and Items

The Moodle gradebook classifies activities in terms of categories and items.

Item: An activity for which you record a grade.

o The seven activities listed above all are items in the gradebook

Category: A set of similar items.

o For the example course above, there would be three different categories:

Assignments, Discussions, and Exams

We will start out the gradebook for a

course by entering categories. When

the categories are there, then we will

add the items



C. Starting the Gradebook

Open your Moodle course page and click on Grades in the Settings block

menu.

This will bring you to the “Grader Report” version

of the gradebook, which should show your student

names, but, other than the assignment we already

have entered, will be devoid of grading categories

and items.

Using the menu in the upper left corner of the gradebook,

change to the Simple View under Categories and items.

D. Adding Categories

First we will add the three categories: Assignments,

Discussions, and Exams

Click on Add category



Start with the Assignments category. Add “Assignments” as

the name.

Generally we will want to leave the maximum grade on the

category at 100%. Moodle treats the maximum grade in a

category as a percentage.

Click on Save Changes

Do the same for the Exams and Discussions categories.

At this point, the Simple View should look

something like the picture on the right.

Save Changes.



E. Weighted Mean of Grades1

At this point, we need to tell the gradebook the relative point values of the different categories.

Exam #1 100 pts Exam category = 300 pts

Exam #2 200 pts

Assignment #1 50 pts Assignment category = 150 pts



Discussion #1 25 pts Discussion category = 50 pts

Discussion #2 25 pts

One way of doing this is to change the aggregation method for the course to weighed mean of

grades and use the category point values as weights.2

1 See the Appendix for an explanation of how weighted mean of grades works.

2 There is another way: putting the category point totals in the “Category total” boxes in the Simple View. I have

had problems with this method automatically checking the Extra Credit boxes, which creates problems in the

gradebook., so I avoid it.



Change the Aggregation for the course to Weighted mean of grades. This will open up a

Weight column. Put the appropriate weights (300, 150, and 50 respectively) in the weight boxes

for the categories.

Click on Save changes.

E. Adding Grade Items

We now have all the categories specified in

the gradebook.

Next, we need to add the grade items

Grade items are items for which you will enter a grade in the gradebook. In our example, we

are using the grade items shown below along with their maximum grades

Exam #1 100 pts Assignment #1 50 pts Discussion #1 25 pts

Exam #2 200 pts Assignment #2 50 pts Discussion #2 25 pts


Let’s add the Exam grade items first.

Make sure that you have Saved changes.

Click on Add grade item.

Enter Exam 1 as the Item Name.

Set the Maximum grade as 100.

Choose Exams as the Grade category

Save changes.



Repeat the above for the

other exam, giving it a

maximum grade of 200.

When you have done this,

the Simple View of the

course structure should

show two exams in the

Exams category.

Save changes.

Repeat the above for the two Discussions.

Set Maximum grade to 25 for each discussion

Choose Discussions as the Grade Category

Save your changes

F. Moving a Grade Item or Category

When we created Assignment #1 on the main

course page, it automatically inserted it in the

grade book, which had not yet been set up.

Now that the gradebook is set up, we would

like to move the Assignment #1 grade item

into the Assignments category.

Click on the Move

icon in the

Assignment #1

row. (The up-down

arrows icon.)



You now will see rectangles surrounded by dotted lines in each of

the places it is possible to move this grade item.

Click on the rectangle below the Assignments category, where we

would like the Assignments #1 grade item to be.

This will move the assignment to its proper place.

When we enter the other two assignments, we will make sure and place them in the Assignments

category.

Your gradebook now is set up

We have remember that we set the maximum category totals to 100. The category total is

expressed as a percent, so the 100 represents 100%.

The Extra Credit boxes should be unchecked. 3

3 If you want to give extra credit for an item or category, please ask me about how to do it.



F. The Grader Report

To see the gradebook in which you enter grades, select View, Grader report from

the “Choose an action” menu.

We have set the gradebook up with four sections: one for each of the categories and one for the

entire course.

Each category of grades includes a Category Total:

Don’t enter anything in the category total

boxes. Moodle will automatically calculate the

category total as a percent. For example,

suppose two exam grades of 80 and 150 have

been entered. The maximum grades on the two

exams are 100 and 200, respectively. The

maximum possible is 300 pts. The grade then is

230/300 = 76.67%

A grade item in the gradebook is not counted if nothing has been entered. If you enter a zero for

a grade item, then it will be counted.



H. Entering Grades

To enter grades in the gradebook, click on Turn editing on in the upper right corner

of the Grader Report.

Enter the grades in the boxes that appear.

When you move the cursor over one of the boxes, the name of the student will

appear.

When you have entered a set of grades, click on the Update button at the bottom of the grader

report page.

I. Setting Your Grade Scale

The default grade scale in Moodle is the following:

A: 93% A-: 90% B+: 87% B: 83% B-: 80% and so forth

If you use a different grade scale for

a course, you can change the grade

scale used by Moodle for the course.

Select Edit, Letters, Edit to edit the

grade letters.

Check Override site defaults.

Enter your grade scale and then

Save changes.



J. Displaying both Percentage and Letter Grade in Gradebook

It is helpful to display not only the percentage in the course grade, but also the

corresponding letter grade.

To set up your grade\book with this type of display, go into the gradebook and

turn editing on.

When editing has been turned on in the gradebook,

you will see an Edit icon under the name of the

course.

Click on this edit icon.

Change the

Grade display type to

Percentage (letter)

or

Letter (percentage).

Note: If you see a

much simpler display

than the one above,

click on Show

advanced.

Save changes.

Turn editing off.



Using Moodle to Record Attendance

A. Setting Up Attendance

To set Moodle up so that you can record attendance, click on Add an

activity or resource and then Attendance.

If you give an attendance grade in your class, then

select the number of points it counts in the Grade

section. Otherwise select No grade.

If you select “No grade” then attendance will not

show up in the gradebook. If you select a point

value then it will.4

Save and return to the course. You now will see

“Attendance” included in the list of links in the weekly

outline.

Click on the Attendance link.

You will see a screen that looks

something like the picture on the right.

You need to tell Moodle when your

classes are. To do this, click on the

Add tab.

4 It is possible to include attendance in your gradebook without giving a point value. In this case you will be able to

see a record of attendance in the gradebook, but it will not count toward the total grade. If you want to do this,

please see me and I will tell you how.



Do the following in the “Add session” screen:

1. Check Create multiple sessions

2. Enter the start and end dates of your course.

3. Enter the duration of your class, which would be one hr for MWF classes

4. Check the days on which your class meets (in this example, MWF).

5. Click on Add sessions.

You be told that the sessions have been automatically generated and then you will return to the

“Add session” screen.

Next, click on the Settings tab.

This screen allows you delete attendance

variables that you do not use. For example, I

do not keep track of whether students are late,

so I will delete the “Late: category.

You also can set point values for the various

categories if you like.

Click on Update when you are ready.



B. Recording Attendance

When you are ready to record attendance during or after class,

click on the Attendance link on the course page.

You will see a list of days

looking something like the

picture on the right.

In this example, Moodle is

set up to display class days

for a particular Week.

You can change the

display to All, All Past,

etc,

To record attendance for a particular day, click on the green circle for that day. You then can

record people using the grading categories you have chosen.

Note: An easy way to record attendance is to click

on the “P” link, which will record all students in

the class as present. Then you can change the few

who are absent, late, or excused.



Appendix: Grading Aggregation

I have had several questions about the difference between Simple weighted mean of grades and

Weighted mean of grades. Here is a brief, if somewhat mathematical explanation of what they

mean.

A. Simplest Weight Mean of Grades

You almost always want to use simplest weighted mean of grades when you are averaging

Grade Items.

Simplest weighted mean of grades uses the point values of the grade items as weights. This

amounts to computing the percent for the category as a simple percentage.

For example, suppose you are

giving two exams, one of which

counts 100 points and the other 200

points. You have the exam

category set up to use simplest

weighted mean to calculate the

average for this category.

Suppose that a student receives the following grades on the two exams

Exam 1: 80/100

Exam 2: 180/200

Moodle calculates the student’s percent for this category as follows.

% = 260/300 = 86.67%



B. Weighted Mean of Grades

You need to use weighted mean of grades when you are averaging categories in the

gradebook.

The gradebook in these instructions

is set up to use the “Weighted Mean

of Grades” aggregation type to

calculate the course grades.

Here is an example in which we use the point totals for each category as weights.

Item Student’s Grade Maximum Category Weight

Assignment #1 30 50

Assignment #2 40 50 150

Assignment #3 50 50

Discussion #1 20 25 50

Discussion #2 22 25

Exam #1 80 100 300

Exam #2 180 200



The percentages for each category are as shown below

Assignments: 120/150 = 80.00%

Discussions: 42/50 = 84.00%

Exams: 260/300 = 86.67%

The course grade is a weighted average of the category totals, expressed as percentages

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Introduction to Moodle 2 Getting Started - Wofford Collegewebs.wofford.edu/whisnantdm/Training/Moodle/Moodle2... · Moodle 2 – Getting Started Page 6 28-Aug-13 Wofford College Editing